Donald Sutherland: brilliant Canadian actor overlooked by the Oscars

When Donald Sutherland was a young man, contemplating a career in the theatre, he asked his mother if he was good-looking. "No, but your face has a lot of character," she replied. This was arguably an understatement, said The Telegraph. The Canadian actor, who has died aged 88, was among "the most distinctive-looking men ever to make it as a leading Hollywood star". Six-foot four-inches tall, rakish and loose-limbed, he had unruly hair, "big ears, a toothy grin, prominent pale blue eyes and a hang-dog expression". 

He was no one's idea of a pin-up, and on-screen he could be menacing or just vaguely unsettling. A producer once rejected him for a role saying: "This part calls for a guy-next-door type. You don't look like you've lived next door to anyone." And yet, blessed with a "lugubrious" baritone voice that was as "instantly recognisable as James Mason's", Sutherland was also capable of exuding "a brooding sexual magnetism which many women found irresistible".

Admired for his range, and the subtlety of his performances, he appeared in more than 100 films. Directors loved him for his chameleon-like ability to slip into a role and his willingness to accept direction. He'd not always been so malleable, he said. He believed that in Robert Altman's 1970 comedy-drama film "M*A*S*H", he had been too insistent on playing the irreverent army surgeon Hawkeye Pierce in his own way. It was when he was cast in Nicolas Roeg's Venice-set horror film "Don't Look Now" (1973) that he came to the conclusion that "film acting is about the surrender of will to the director".

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After reading the script, based on a Daphne du Maurier story, he'd agreed to appear in the film, but suggested to Roeg that he give it a happier ending. "Do you want to do it or not?" Roeg demanded. "Because that's the film." Sutherland went on to deliver one of his most "memorable performances" as the father grieving his drowned child – even if it was rather overshadowed by speculation about his lengthy and unusually realistic sex scene with Julie Christie, his on-screen wife. Christie has never categorically denied that they had sex on camera, but Sutherland insisted that they had not. A humorous and thoughtful man, he said that the two had only just met when they had to walk naked onto the set. "We laid on the bed and the director said, 'All right, Julie pull your knees up to your shoulder. Donald take your mouth and slide it down the inside of her left thigh.' It went on like this for 12 hours. Neither of us could speak afterwards."

Donald Sutherland was born in New Brunswick in 1935, to Frederick, a salesman, and Dorothy (née McNichol), a maths teacher. A sickly child, who suffered from polio and rheumatic fever, he grew up mainly in Nova Scotia. While at high school, he became, aged 14, Canada's youngest radio DJ, though he had his sights set on being a sculptor. He caught the acting bug while studying engineering and drama at Toronto University, and in 1957 he travelled to England to study at Lamda. After a year he dropped out, and with his first wife, Lois Hardwick, he joined a repertory theatre in Perth. 

In the early 1960s, he started to win roles in British TV shows such as "The Saint", and he also appeared in a West End play with Rex Harrison. His first film was Warren Kiefer's "Castle of the Living Dead" (1964). But his breakout role was as a dim-witted soldier in the 1967 war film "The Dirty Dozen", said The Times, about a group of military prisoners who are freed to take part in a perilous wartime mission. It featured several established stars, but Sutherland recalled that he was in the "bottom six", there to make up the numbers, and he had almost no lines until one of the other actors refused to take part in a scene. At that point, the director Robert Aldrich turned to him and said: "You with the big ears – you do it!" The film was a hit and his Hollywood career began.

At first Hollywood didn't really know what to do with Sutherland, said The Washington Post, and kept casting him as comic "boneheads" in films such as Kelly's Heroes. But his role in the counterculture film "M*A*S*H", set during the Korean War but with a feeling of Vietnam, established him as a star for the new decade. In 1970, he split up with his second wife, the actress Shirley Douglas, with whom he had had twins: Kiefer and Rachel. Soon after, he embarked on an affair with Jane Fonda, his co-star in "Klute"; and together they toured the US with an anti-war revue that he had co-written.

In Bernardo Bertolucci's 1976 film "1900", he played a fascist who smashes a boy's brains out ("And I turned down 'Deliverance' and 'Straw Dogs' because of the violence!"), and he was the scientist who realises what's going on in 1978's "Invasion of the Body Snatchers". At around the same time, he was offered a share of profits in return for two days' filming on "Animal House". Famously, he accepted instead a flat fee of $35,000, and so missed out on about $20 million. 

In 1980, he was quietly brilliant as the concerned father in Robert Redford's hit drama "Ordinary People". But while three other members of the ensemble cast were nominated for an Oscar, he was overlooked. After that, the phone "mysteriously stopped ringing". Nevertheless, he kept going up for roles, and appeared – among other things – as a German spy in "Eye of the Needle" and as a middle-class South African slowly turning against Apartheid in "A Dry White Season". In 1991, there were many who felt he should have won an Oscar for his single scene in Oliver Stone's "JFK". But again, he was not even nominated.

Carrying on working well into his 80s, he became known to new generations of cinemagoers playing a warmly paternal Mr Bennet in "Pride and Prejudice" (2005), and President Snow in "The Hunger Games". Snow is evil, but Sutherland took care not to deny the character humanity. He told the New York Observer: "Do you think Lyndon Johnson felt he was the villain, destroying a million Vietnamese? George W. Bush or Dick Cheney – they don't think of themselves as villains… Snow thinks it is expedient. He's trying to control an empire." 

Along the way, he was in quite a few flops, too, including Hugh Hudson's "Revolution"; and turned down some hits. As he explained, actors can only judge so much from the script. He was married for the last five decades of his life to the French-Canadian actress Francine Racette, with whom he had three more sons, Roeg, Rossif and Angus (whose middle name is Redford). Like Kiefer, they were named in honour of film directors. He was finally awarded an honorary Oscar in 2017.